There are only 30 serious mountain bikers living in the Kingdom of Bhutan out of a population of 750,000 people. And none of them are women. So it’s fair to say Bhutan's MTB scene is in its very beginnings, but that's why we're here.

Where, exactly, is ‘here’?

The Kingdom of Bhutan is a landlocked country in South Asia, in the Eastern Himalayas, between China in the north and India in the south. Dogs, cattle, and horses roam freely in the streets of its cities. Its devoted Buddhist population decorate their houses, public buildings, and temples with a dazzling array of colorful, intricate carvings and paintings. It’s like nowhere I’ve ever been in my life.

Our guide, host, and the man behind this whole circus is Pelden Dorji, and he wants Bhutan's mountain bike scene to be different from the rest of the world. He doesn't want it to suffer from the age-old obsessions with racing and performance. He doesn't want it to be unfriendly to women. He wants the whole world to come and ride here and for women to guide them when they do. So he’s invited Julie Cornelius, founder of the charity World-Ride; photographer Leslie Kehmeier; filmmaker Colleen Meas; and me.

We're here to begin training the first four women in the history of Bhutan to become qualified mountain bike guides, with a little help from Marin.

Bhutan is remote, heavily landlocked, and very hard to reach. The descent into its airport is so dangerous that only 50 pilots in the world are qualified to fly it. So importing even simple spares like tires and tubes takes time and costs a fortune.

That’s why we've brought these bikes, a bunch of packs, some helmets, some clothing, and any other spares we could lay our hands on. It’s going to form a mountain bike library, so any Bhutanese woman who wants to can start learning to ride for free.

Let's talk about Julie Cornelious and her World-Ride organization for a minute. Julie’s a seasoned Moab mountain bike guide who’s been taking riders out to the White Rim, the Needles, and the other legendary backcountry locations near Moab for most of her professional mountain bike life.

But a little while ago, she started to think about the inherent imbalance in mountain biking travel.

Let's say that you book a mountain bike trip to Tanzania. It’s the holiday of a lifetime. It costs you a fortune. But the chances are that the person who set up the tour company and the people on your tour are probably a bit like you too.

World Ride tries to redress that imbalance. It resells places on high-end mountain bike trips all over the world — Guatemala, Chile, Peru, Tanzania, Botswana — and uses the money to train local women as mountain bike guides. So when, say, eight Swiss dentists land in Botswana, a young local woman can show them the best places to ride, show them that women can ride as well as they can, and she can earn a respectable wage, too.

It works. Julie's been running World-Ride for over six years, with established programs all over the world, but this is her first official visit to Bhutan and the beginning of a unique journey for four of their most adventurous women.

We’re in Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan. It's first thing in the morning in the town square, with stray dogs lazing in the sun and a handful of locals watching in genial bemusement. Of the 30 or so people in the whole country who ride mountain bikes, there are hardly any women. So we're starting at the very beginning. Four women from Thimphu who have volunteered to be the first qualified mountain bike guides in the country's history are all standing here. Time to get to work.

Dawa, Khusala, Tshering Dolkar, and Tshering Zam seem as nervous as we are, but as soon as we produce two boxes containing the Alpine 1 bikes, it's like someone's thrown a switch. All shyness disappears, and they fall on the bikes like a seasoned F1 pit crew. With Julie's help and a couple of multi-tools, they attach rotors and rear derailleurs, adjust brakes, and set the pedals, fumbling with Allen wrenches, skimming their knuckles, and laughing all the while.

Pelden leans and whispers in my ear as we watch. “This is the beginning of female mountain biking in Bhutan, right here, right now.”

Only Khusala has ever ridden a bike as a kid. The other three only started riding a bike at all less than a month ago, and the younger Tshering got on a bike just three days before we arrived. So once the bikes are up and built, Julie's seasoned guiding experience really comes into its own.

She is gentle, kind, and patient as our candidates take their first tentative steps — it's truly heartwarming to see. Our candidates struggle to balance and to manage the power of the brakes, but the progress is incredibly fast. Julie is on standby the whole time, but their support for each other speaks volumes about how positive the future of mountain biking here could be. They run alongside each other with hands on the saddle, urging one more pedal stroke, a lean into the turns… it couldn’t be a more positive start if we’d scripted it.

Later that afternoon, all four volunteers decamp to a nearby trailhead, about half an hour's drive outside of Thimphu. Against a stunning backdrop of a giant golden Budhha and the Eastern Himalayas receding into the horizon, all four women ride an off-road bike off road for the very first time in their lives.

The terrain’s nothing crazy — just a dirt plateau without too many bumps or slopes — but it takes me and everyone else watching right back to the very beginnings of our mountain bike journeys. It's no easy thing to ride a bike on something that isn't tarmac, but within minutes, all of them are standing in the saddle, adopting attack positions, and lowering their torsos to the bars. Some progress faster than others — it’s all still pretty wobbly — but they’re doing a hell of a lot better than I would if I’d been riding for a week at the age of, say, 35. When the older of the two Tsherings gets the spirit in her and just rides off down the trail unprompted, the collective cheer rings off the mountainside loud enough for the whole valley to hear it.

By the time we meet up with our intrepid four in Paro, just nine days after they first built their new bikes, it looks like they’ve been riding for months. The younger Tshering, who was struggling to stay upright on the first day, is now riding unaided with confidence, turning in tight spaces and grinning like a Cheshire cat. All four women follow Julie’s lead and start riding together in single file around a giant prayer wheel, and casually drop off a high curb, standing on their pedals, without a hint of nerves. We get word that they’ve been practicing together every day for two hours, refusing to let each other give up until real progress has been made. After a couple hours of coaching from Julie, we repair upstairs in a nearby coffee shop to hear how they’ve been doing, and it’s hard to stop them all talking at once—- the excitement and enthusiasm pour out in an unstoppable stream, and ratchets up several notches when we show them some footage of women riding this year’s Rampage.

It’s a cliche to say a journey like this is a privilege, but there’s no better way to describe our time in the Kingdom of Bhutan. We’re all overwhelmed with the beauty of the mountains, with the welcome we’ve received, and the nerve-shredding steep natural trails we’ve been able to ride. Most of all, though, we’re privileged to have been given the chance to meet four women who — despite having little or no experience, few role models, and precious little free time after working and raising their families — are determined to play their part in the future of Bhutan’s mountain bike culture. Weeks after we got back, they’re still sending us videos of them riding together, heading out off-road, laughing their heads off.

So if you believe — as they, and Julie, and millions of riders around the world do — that the future of MTB has to be more female, bear it in mind when planning your next trip. If you’re lucky, a Bhutanese woman might just be there to show you the way.

Help more women around the world get into MTB by donating or booking a trip with World Ride